Podcast Corner: Never mind the length, hear the quality
Donal Dineen. Photo: Bríd O'Donovan.
The norm for podcast interviews is around 45 minutes to an hour. There's good reason for this. The host and/or subject's attention can start to flag, the list of topics runs out, the rapport isn't there from the start. Think of WTF with Marc Maron, Grounded with Louis Theroux, or even the Longform podcast, a long-running series with non-fiction writers about how they tell their stories.
All clock in at around the hour mark (Maron's does too, if you exclude the 15-minute intros that you either find therepeutic or irritating). Though the Joe Rogan Experience is the obvious anomaly, few interviews need to be any longer. When they are, there has to be a reason behind it.
Written and presented by Donal Dineen, whose superlative Make Me an Island has just passed its first anniversary, We Are The Makers is a new long-form audio documentary series focusing on the work of contemporary Irish artists and their practices. The first episode clocks in at two-and-a-quarter hours - Dineen explains that it was edited down from some 18 hours of recordings over four sittings in January. It feels like the definitive interview with Eamonn Doyle, a renowned photographer who had a whole other life running Irish indie techno label D1 Recordings.
So this episode feels like three or four in one. We get Doyle's early life, showcasing an entrepreneurial/morally dubious spirit through importing pornography magazines from Spain and selling individual pages on to the desperate young denizens of Dublin for 50p a page. You'd make £40 from one magazine in the early 1980s, he explains.
We get his first footsteps into working with a camera, trying to recapture those special shots at college that were made with a broken lens that he left on a bus. His musical journey, like Dineen's, exploded into view with U2's gig at Croke Park in 1985, supported by REM. "There is no more mystery," he says later, about an hour in, regarding previously disparate music scenes around the world. His return to photography in the past decade, culminating in the Dublin trilogy of books i, ON, and End, and an exhibition at the RHA which left Dineen wide-eyed in wonder, will leave listeners inspired, though it's all bathed with bathos due to the death of his mother as his star is rising. None of the chat is rushed, all of it is captivating.
So you can listen to the first episode of We Are The Makers in spurts, splitting it into your own minisodes, or you can listen in one go - it'll have you motivated. It's a work of art in itself.
- If you're a Line Of Duty fan at least. Season six of the BBC cop series has probably been the most dense so far, with constant references to nearly-forgotten characters and plots from previous seasons. Obsessed With Line Of Duty is the show's official podcast and - along with the weekly recap from this newspaper - will help you make sense of the remaining two episodes. It even includes input from cast members.
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